Responding to yesterday’s post on thinking mind, a reader asks:

Thinking mind, are you trying to talk about a physical aspect relating to brain waves and the brain?  Or are you talking about in effect the part of the spirit that interacts with the brain?

It’s a good question, but one I can’t answer directly. It requires a bit of a walk through how I explore magick. But I’ll try to make it interesting.

A Priori vs A Posteriori Models

A priori (Latin for “before the fact”): You reason about how it ought to work, based on how you understand the rest of the world.

Observation (or “a posteriori”): You use sensory connections to see different parts of magick, watch them work, and try to figure out what they do.

Most people haven’t learned sensory connections, so when they model magick, it has to be a priori. Which is why you have all these models — the energy model, the spirit model, etc. — that don’t just disagree on the details, but disagree about what’s going on at a very fundamental level. It’s because we’re trying to tell a story based on observing the results of rituals, without being able to look at each step that produced that result.

In other words, most models start by saying, “There must be a thing that does X, so let’s assume it exists and name it this.” And, if someone tells you “There’s this thinking mind that sits between physical nerves and your mental muscles,” it’s natural to ask whether the idea grew from the idea of brainwaves, or from the idea that your spirit must connect with your brain at some point.

But I never expected thinking mind to be there. It doesn’t grow naturally from anything we normally think about. When I first started actively connecting mental muscles to my mind, around 2005, I just thought I was connecting them to my brain. And if someone had suggested an extra layer between mental muscles and brain, I would have tossed it out via Occam’s Razor.

Finding Thinking Mind

Then, around 2007, I was learning healing and getting good at connecting to different types of tissues, noticing the signatures of various injuries, and all the other aspects of sensory connections specific to observing the physical body. My focus was knee injuries, but one day I connected to my head, and noticed two sets of signatures in the brain. All other tissues have one signature. Totally surprising.

I looked at other nerves. They also had two signatures. And I traced the connections between mental muscles and what I thought was the brain. They only went to one of the signatures.

One signature seemed to change quickly as I thought different things, so I called it “thought layer.” The other changed slowly, in response to moods and drugs and such, and I called it “nerve layer.” I conceived of both of them as being part of the brain.

Shortly after finding thought layer, I reasoned that, if thought layer carries messages, then to numb an injury, you should act on thought layer. So I did, and my healing got worse. Turns out, healing changes the overall signalling pattern of a nerve, not the current message it’s sending, and needs to happen on the nerve layer.

Thought layer was central to developing consciousness integration in 2009, and it’s been the basis for my communication with spirits and ethereal software since 2010. I mention this because a priori models often include parts that “have to be there” based on the preconceptions of the mage, but that you can’t actually interact with. Thought layer isn’t in that category.

In 2010 or 2011, as I did more training in communication, the spirits I work with called the entirety of thought layer “thinking mind.” They conceived of it as separate from the brain — as something spirits have, too. So I adopted their term.

Summary

I never expected thinking mind. It’s only in my model because of what I saw with sensory connections. Later, that model lead to useful effects, which cemented thinking mind in my understanding of magick.

This has a down-side, though: I can’t guide you to understand thinking mind, because that process doesn’t start with “Your brain has brainwaves” or “Your spirit must connect to your mind.” It starts with sensing two signatures from nerves, and going exploring.

I’ll revisit this after doing a better job teaching sensory connections later this year.

PS. If you need an answer to quiet your curiosity, “Thinking mind = How your spirit connects to your brain” is close enough, as long as you’re not trying to connect or work with thinking mind.

Want more to read? Similar posts:

• How Mental Muscles Connect to Your Brain
• Finding Where Mind Meets Body
• How I’m Making Manifesting Reliable

Mike asks:

How do mental muscles interface with the brain?

I have 3 answers for this: Short, medium, and needs-its-own-book. You’ll get the first two today.

Quick warning: This is all fairly technical. I wasn’t planning on talking about this yet, and haven’t really laid the groundwork to make it easy to follow. If you’re still working on finding your mental muscles, you might want to skip this post for now.

Short Answer

The short answer is: Thinking mind.

Yes, I know that’s a funny term. But it’s how the spirits that teach me refer to it, and I haven’t gotten around to a proper naming.

Think of thinking mind as the brain’s energy layer (although this isn’t quite correct). It connects to your brain, and it’s laid out to be easy to communicate with, both for spirits, and for ethereal software, and for mental muscles. Everyone’s brain is different, but everyone’s thinking mind is similar enough that you can find your way around it, even if you’ve never worked with that person before.

Mental muscles seem to know where in thinking mind they want to connect. Then, as you learn to use that mental muscles (that is, as you learn to do that sort of magick), you’re also learning how use your brain to send the right instructions to thinking mind, and how to listen for replies.

When you awaken mental muscles, it’s important to connect them to thinking mind. That’s what that previous post was about. In it, I simply said “mind,” instead of “thinking mind,” since I try to avoid specialized terminology when I can.

Medium Answer

The medium answer is: You should really see it for yourself. There’s only so much I can do with words. Real insight comes from watching it in action.

But to do that, you’ll need sensory connections. Which are somewhat advanced if you haven’t done them before. So, this isn’t so much a longer answer, as a more hands-on and advanced one.

But, assuming you’ve done all the exercises in that sensory connections series, here’s the basics of thinking mind:

Connect your head. You’ll notice two sets of signatures: One for the brain, another for thinking mind. Both have their own energy layer. If you trace the paths from each energy layer toward the physical cells (nerves, in this case), both sets of paths meet up at the first level below energy layer (which I call “state layer,” because I haven’t done a proper, metaphor-type naming there, either).

Each area of thinking mind is made of nerves that fire together, even if they’re not physically adjacent. If you trace the paths that connect thinking mind to the brain, you’ll find that one area of thinking mind often corresponds to many areas of the brain.

Certain effects should focus on thinking mind (ones dealing with information), while other effects should focus on the brain (ones dealing with the overall state of the mind, like fatigue or relaxation). In 2013, I’ll probably get more into the details of communication and mental effects. For now, see the series on consciousness integration for some tips on finding thinking mind.

Long Answer

How, exactly, does a thought travel from brain to thinking mind, and out to the mental muscle / spirit / ethereal software? That’s a long answer, and something you really can’t use until you’ve thoroughly learned all the aspects of sensory connections.

That series is from a year ago, and it drops you into advanced topics quickly. I’ll be covering sensory connections in a more thorough, easier-to-follow (hopefully) series coming up, and in the book, so that afterward, we can have better discussions about things like thinking mind.

Follow-up post with more on thinking mind.

Want more to read? Similar posts:

• Connecting to Your Mental Muscles
• Reader Questions: Awakening Your Mental Muscles
• Updated Term: Mental Muscles

Continuing the quartz / orgone series. So far, I’ve found that the layered orgonite (metal + paper) was magickally inert, but that quartz is magickally interesting: It has significant, stable magickal structures, and if you put energy into it, those structures will absorb the energy and re-emit it in the quartz’s signature, which is usually more noticeable than the same amount of energy in your own signature. (That’s why people think quartz amplifies energy).

There’s one more component of the orgone generator Ananael used to charge his talismans: An oscillating magnetic field. So today, I’ll test quartz with a magnet.

Results Summary

Short story: Magnetism does not appear to affect quartz, at least in terms of magickal energy. I didn’t have an oscillating electromagnet, but I did have a powerful magnet from a fridge-mounted spice rack, and moving it near and around the quartz does not produce magickal energy.

And if that were the only story, I would’ve just tacked it onto the end of last post and called this series done. But today, I want to tell you about some errors I made in researching this, and the importance of rigorous testing.

In this post, I’ll use normal text like this to tell you the chronological story, and what I thought at the time.

And I’ll use this tabbed-in gray text to tell you what I now think was actually happening.

Initial Test: Sensory Connections

After discovering all this stuff I’d never expected — magickal structures in quartz, ice and water, and how temperature influences the structures — I was pretty ready to accept other new findings, too.

So, I held the quartz in my hand, connected to the structures, and moved a magnet in a circle over it. (A vertical circle, so the bottom of the circle was close to the quartz, and the top was far away).

And I felt something. A tingle in my palm (the one holding the quartz). And when I looked hard, I could sense energy in the quartz. I was amazed, because I never expected the magnet to influence the quartz, but it was.

I now think that the tingle in my palm was proprioception — the feeling you get when your hands almost touch. It’s a tingling, but it’s not energy. (You’ll often see beginner energy healing classes tell you to almost touch your hands so you can “feel energy emanating from your body.” But if you close your eyes and have a friend almost touch you, there’s no tingle, so clearly, it’s not actual energy.)

The bit of energy in the quartz was from my own sensory connections. Remember, good sensory connections have very little energy on. But moving my hand — the one with the magnet — distracted me a bit, and made my sensory connection worse. Add in the tingling, which made me think there was energy there, and I can easily see how I would have sent a little energy along the connection, which the quartz would reflect back at me.

I also tried moving the magnet in a big circle around the hand holding the quartz, but didn’t feel any energy. At the time, I figured it had something to do with the flat verse rough sides of the quartz. (My piece of quartz is the size of a small fist, one side with flat facets, the other side broken roughly.)

What I now think happened: Moving my hand in a circle around the quartz didn’t activate the same proprioception tingling. And I didn’t send energy along the connection either because this movement was less distracting, or because, without the tingling of the proprioception, I wasn’t thinking about energy.

Proper Testing

With all my talk about scientific testing, I’d better not leave it with just my sensory connections. So I devised a fairly simple, but fairly rigorous, procedure:

I close my eyes, make the sensory connections, and tell Lisa I’m ready. Lisa flips a coin. If it’s heads, she moves the magnet in a circle just above the quartz. If it’s tails, she moves her hand in the same motion, without the magnet (which should produce the same breeze and any sounds from her shifting her weight, but no magickal energy in the quartz). In both cases, she doesn’t say anything. (We don’t want me picking up any clues from her voice). I say whether I noticed the energy before opening my eyes, to prevent me from reading her body language.

As you’ve probably gathered by now, it didn’t work. Once my eyes were closed, I didn’t feel the proprioception tingles. Depending on how hard I tried to sense the energy — which correlates with how much energy I accidentally put on the sensory connection — I’d either notice energy, or not notice it. Lisa sometimes put a bit of energy into the quartz, too, so I’m glad her hand was there in both conditions.

After a few trials, I stopped, and figured out what happened. Then I paid more attention to keeping my sensory connection quiet, and when I did, didn’t notice any energy in any of the test cases. I would still feel the tingles when my hands got close, and I’d still feel the energy if I let myself get distracted. All those senses were real, but when I tried to add them up into a story of how all the moving parts work, I got that story wrong. And that’s why it’s so important to do proper, blind testing.

Seeing What You Expect

This isn’t unique to sensory connections. If you expect something to taste good, it probably will, as long as it doesn’t actively taste bad. In a dark room, your eyes will naturally start to see spots and shapes, and if you expect to see something in particular, you will probably see it in those shapes.

The key to doing good research isn’t avoiding errors. It’s creating tests that can show you your errors, so you can accept them and learn from them. My hope is that, by showing you my errors, you’ll be a little less worried about making your own.

Hat tip to Doing Magick. His post on the importance of teachers to have humility helped me decide to post this and show you my errors.

Want more to read? Similar posts:

• Exploring Quartz
• Energizing Quartz, Water and Ice
• Why Feynman Can’t Explain Magnets

Famous Thomas Jefferson quote: “Never put off till tomorrow what you can do today.”

I used to try for that. Squeeze another practice session in, another experiment.

For non-magickal work, where you sleep a full night and wake up rested, it’s probably good advice.

But magick takes more out of you, especially if you’re learning new skills using new mental muscles. After a few days doing as much as I possibly can, I slow down noticeably. If I keep pushing, I shut down and have to rest.

I never took rigorous data on it. There’s so much natural variation in how much I can accomplish any one day, that the data would be hard to use anyway. But I’m pretty sure I accomplish more by working until I’m tired, but not exhausted, so that I’m fully recovered each morning.

One exception to this: If you’re going to be caught up in something non-magickal for a while, like a work project, you can exhaust yourself the day before, then use the work time to recover magickally. You won’t be as sharp for the work project, though, so up to you if it’s a good tradeoff.

Want more to read? Similar posts:

• Rest Isn’t Just OK. It’s Good.
• Astral Projection and Spirit Training
• Finding What Matters – The Easy Way

Years ago, I improved the way my mental muscles connect to my mind, which let me see the building blocks of magick more clearly. Last night, I made an error, breaking those connections. This morning, I re-made them. Here are a few notes that might help you improve the way your mental muscles connect to your mind, too.

Breaking My Connections

I was working with a mentor to change the signature of the power that drives my mental muscles. (This is part of an advanced direct magick project I’m working on). We got the signature wrong, didn’t realize, and left it on overnight. This morning, the connections between my mental muscles and my mind had stopped working.

In summary:

• My mental muscles were awake and ready.
• My mind was also alert.
• But the two weren’t talking to one another.

This lets us isolate the importance of how your mental muscles connect to your mind, which is something I don’t get to talk about a lot.

First, how it felt: Like nothing in particular. I could still engage the parts of my brain that normally communicate with my mental muscles. So all my mental postures felt normal, and I didn’t even notice the problem until after breakfast. This is quite different than if a spirit drains your energy, where you know something is wrong. And it’s the basis for my comments on consciousness a while back.

The first thing on my agenda today was to test quartz with a magnet for my other series. (That was going to be my post today, until I had to fix this problem). I engaged all the parts of my brain for making the sensory connections, felt like I made one, but couldn’t sense anything.

So I tried looking at my mental muscles. From years of awakening them, I know how they’re supposed to look, and can usually diagnose problems quickly. But I couldn’t get a good connection there, either.

Re-Connecting to my Mental Muscles

I could somewhat engage the muscle for awakening other mental muscles, which was enough to give it a simple command: Fix the connection between my mental muscles and my mind. (I knew my mental muscles themselves were okay because, if they weren’t, I wouldn’t have been able to engage that mental muscle to give it a command.)

Once the connections were made, I had to strengthening the parts of my mind that direct them.

At first, I could only give the mental muscles commands, but not really interact with them.

After some practice, I could see what the mental muscles were doing, but only in broad strokes. For example, I could connect to my knee, but not make out the different tissues there. (Each type of tissue has its own signature, and normally I can tell them apart quite easily).

As I practiced more, I could start to see the details. Everything came into focus again. I could see what my mental muscles were doing, and guide them through each step of a technique, instead of just giving commands and letting them execute it however they want.

This was the same progression I made the first time: From giving commands, to watching them work, to guiding the technique. It took a lot longer the first time (months or years), but it’s the same progression.

How to Do It Yourself

So, what’s the take away for you? Think about how your mental muscles connect to your mind. Try this:

• Engage your mental muscles, using your normal mental posture for doing magick.
• Keep them mental muscles engaged, but relax your mind, like you do in a relaxing meditation*.
• Ask your mental muscles to connect more fully to your mind. Ask in the same way you give any other instruction — words, visualization, whatever.

*There’s a more advanced technique that will do a more thorough job, but it requires a bunch of other skills. In particular, relaxing your mind is a simplification from the full technique.

Hopefully, with your mind relaxed, your mental muscles will be able to connect to it. Then, engage the mental posture for those mental muscles, and try to use them for something. At first, your mind will be adjusting to the new connections, and you won’t be able to see much more clearly than you did before. But after a few tries, you should start seeing more details.

The first time you do this, it will make small improvements. The only reason I was able to set everything up in a day is because my mind was already set up, and I’ve already awakened all the mental muscles involved in making these kind of connections. The first time I did this, it took months, maybe a year, to get everything set up so I could guide my mental muscles in real time. And I want you to have realistic expectations coming into this work.

But give it a try. After awakening your mental muscles, connecting them to your mind is probably the quickest way to get better at direct magick. If it’s successful, you should start seeing the building blocks of magick more clearly after practicing with those mental muscles a few times.

Comments

Got results, notes or questions? Leave a comment.

Want more to read? Similar posts:

• How Mental Muscles Connect to Your Brain
• Reader Questions: Awakening Your Mental Muscles
• Updated Term: Mental Muscles

I just got Mastering the Mystical Heptarchy (MtMH) by Scott Stenwick, better known as Ananael on Augoeides.

If you read Augoeides, you’re probably familiar with his “magick in pop culture” posts on witchdoctors, teens who think they’re vampires and the like. This book is totally different. It’s a technical guide to Enochian ritual magick, with a tone like his posts on changing the direction of the symbols in the LBRP / LIRH.

I’m not done with the book yet, but I’m going to blog as I read it, when sections catch my eye. So far, it’s been a great intro to Enochian, and an interesting window into how Scott thinks about magick, which is worth reading in itself. It’s not the sort of book I’d normally buy, and I was secretly worried I might not like it, but so far it’s been great, and I’m glad I got it.

Here’s the first idea that caught my eye:

Ceremonial vs Ritual Magick

Scott makes a distinction between ceremonial and ritual magick: Ceremonial magick is performing already-written rituals, and ritual magick is creating the rituals. So, to use a computer analogy, a ceremonial magician is like a user running an application, and a ritual magician is like a programmer, writing them. (Paraphrased. See the page in his book to the right, click for larger image).

This, I think, is the source of much of our disagreement when Scott and I talk in the comments. I hadn’t realized that ritual mages create rituals from scratch. (Well, I knew that, but didn’t think about it much). Or that they thought of themselves as programmers. Though now that I think of it, he has a fair point.

But he draws the user / programmer distinction a different way than I do. Neither is right or wrong, but we probably both thought we were drawing the same distinction, which would lead to confusion.

When I think about programming, I think about how the symbols got their meanings. Because, while the ritual mage assembles the symbols into useful instructions, someone had to program the force that responds to those symbols — tell it what each symbol means and how to implement the changes that the mage asks for.

It’s that assigning of results to symbols and pre-made rituals that I’ve always focused on as programming. Though now that I’m thinking it through, I’m thinking a better analogy would be assembly:

Ceremonial mages do already-written rituals, like end users who just run an application.

Ritual mages, who design their own rituals, are like programmers. If you string together pre-made rituals like the LBRP into a full ritual event, that’s like scripting (an easy form of programming), while combining symbols into meta-symbols and rituals is like programming in a full language like C++.

I call the thing that recognizes those symbols and executes the commands “ethereal software.” And at some point, someone has to program the meanings of those symbols into the ethereal software, which is like using assembly language to program C++. Very few people program assembly, compared with C++ programmers, but it’s necessary for some tasks.

Programming symbols into ethereal software is much easier than programming assembly, by the way.

Back to the Book

That strayed pretty far from the book. But that’s the mark of a good book: The author lays out his thinking clearly enough that they spark new ideas in the reader, and even if you disagree (which I expect to do a few more times), their book has brought you a new idea. Which is the whole point of reading.

Want more to read? Similar posts:

• The Down-Side of Publishing Houses
• Shielding While Asleep (Part 4 of 4)
• Shielding: Tips for Beginners (Part 3 of 4)

Last post, I told you about the structures that I found when I connected to quartz. Today, I have two more findings: How quartz responds to magickal energy, and what I found looking at other materials with regular atomic structures.

How Quartz Responds to Magical Energy

Most people say that quartz amplifies energy. This is always struck me as dubious, because “amplify energy” sounds a lot like “perpetual motion machine”: They’re both holy grails of pseudoscience.

Yes, I’m conflating physics::energy with magick::energy. Mea culpa.

My model has always been that quartz changes the signature of the energy to one that’s more obvious and tingly. See, when you feel energy, the tingles happen more when the energy is in a different signature than your body. And if I align the energy with your body’s signature, you don’t feel anything.

I’ve verified the insensitivity to properly-aligned energy numerous times in healing. It also applies to connections: A connection in a different signature is obvious, while one in your signature is hard to notice, though there are other considerations to making a hard-to-notice connection, too.

Before, that was just my best guess. Now, I can watch the quartz react to energy, and see how it works:

When I send energy into the quartz, the structures absorb the energy, becoming active. (Remember, previously the structures were inactive, meaning not charged). 1-2 seconds later, it emits energy with the signature of the structures, and the structures become inactive again. Watching each step, and seeing the timing, it’s pretty clear what’s going on.

The amount of energy emitted by the quartz equals the amount of energy you put it (as nearly as I can tell with my sensory connections). It feels more tingly because the signature is farther away from your body’s signature, not because of the quantity of energy.

What About Other Materials?

My guess is that the regular atomic structure of the crystal caused the magick structure I observed. A spirit I asked about this shared that opinion, as does Ananael.

Lisa is wonderfully geeky about a great deal of science, and pointed out the water has a regular atomic structure, and ice even more so. She suggested that, according to this model, they should both have similar magickal structures.

I initially dismissed the idea, because no one uses ice or water for energy work, at least, not the way they use crystals. It just sounded weird. But sounding weird is a bad basis for science, so I tested it.

Water

Much to my surprise, water does have magical structure. A few notes:

The amount of water correlates with the size of the structure. Not surprising, but worth noting.

Within a gallon of bottled drinking water, you can see a lot of different areas of magickal structure. The boundaries between areas change over time, probably as the water moves.

When you first pour a glass of water, it won’t have a magickal structure. If you stay connected, you can watch the magickal structure form over about 30 seconds.

The water will absorb energy sent into it, but not re-emit it. Instead, that energy breaks down the magickal structures it touches. It looks like there’s some sort of sturdiness to the structure, perhaps related to the difference between solids and liquids.

Note: I tested tap water, bottled drinking water and distilled. The distilled had a more obvious structure, and re-emitted a bit of energy, but the results weren’t substantially different.

Ice

We froze a cup of tap water, then tested the same things. Notes:

There is a magickal structure there, but it’s hard to see. I haven’t explained enough about energy and activation, but the magickal structures in quartz aren’t 100% inactive. They’re just inactive enough that they’re not sending out energy. But in the ice, the structures were even less active, and thus harder to see. Degrees of inactivity is something I’ve seen before with hibernating mental muscles, but haven’t explained on the blog yet.

When I sent a bit of energy into the ice, it absorbed most of the energy, emitting only a small amount. By making more connections, and trying to follow the path from magickal structure toward physical atoms (in the same way I follow paths from energy to cells for healing), I could see the energy draining away.

These two results make me think there’s a relationship between magical energy and physical heat*. A lot of energy would equal a tiny amount of heat, based on what I saw of how the atoms responded (or whatever was at the end of those paths). I’ll suggest a test after discussing some more results tomorrow.

*This is another result that I would never have predicted. I’ve always seen magickal energy as distinct from other things called “energy,” like heat.

After telling Lisa about putting energy into the ice and only getting a tiny amount back, she tried it. At this point, we hadn’t discussed how much energy I put in the ice, so she just did what she normally does and sent a continuous stream for about 10 seconds. She reported feeling a return of energy just like quartz, and after several trials, had an energy headache (same as you would with quartz).

I tried her procedure, sending a continuous stream for 10 seconds, and got the same results: A slight delay, then a full return of energy, just like quartz.

I made a bunch of connections to the magical structure and watched. The first bit of energy indeed gets absorbed into the structure (presumably going toward physical atoms, though that’s really just conjecture). But that path can only carry so much energy per second. As you send more energy, it fills the paths, and any new energy coming in gets re-emitted, just like energy sent into quartz. In my initial tests, I just hadn’t sent enough energy to fill up the pathways.

Sensory Connections

One of the reasons I’m confident in my sensory connections is they routinely show me things I don’t expect. All the results with the ice and water were surprising, and if someone with a new age fluffy persona had told me those things, I would’ve simply dismissed it. Lisa’s finding about ice re-emitting energy was particularly surprising, because my previous testing had made me expect the opposite. These kind of results make me trust my sensory connections much more than if they always confirmed what I expected to see.

There are other reasons I trust my sensory connections too. I just wanted to highlight a few items from these tests.

Comments

I’d love to get some independent verification of sending energy into water (no energy re-emitted) and ice (energy re-emitted with a few-second delay, depending on the rate you send energy in). Try it, and let me know what you find.

Want more to read? Similar posts:

• Exploring Quartz
• Experiments with Orgone
• Just What Is Orgonite?

Update: Ananael filled me in on some backstory of the quote. Apparently, it was intended to be satire. Looks like I’ve fallen into the trap of taking a satire seriously and railing against it. My bad. I’m leaving the posts up because (1) I believe in owning up to mistakes, not covering them up, and (2) these posts might be useful someday, when I have some legit word games to call BS on.

Yesterday’s post about calling BS on faux-wisdom didn’t come out quite right. I focused on how to recognize it, not why calling BS is important. But I think this topic is important, so I’m going to take another shot.

I’ll post about quartz later today, too.

There are some statements that are concrete and fair, but simply inaccurate. “Magick works by known psychological principles (your love spell gave you the confidence to talk to people), or by placebo.” The person is making a strong, factual statement, which they presumably believe. The correct response is to respectfully cite experiences and results that are inconsistent with their belief, to change their mind.

Then there are statements that are intentionally hard to pin down, like “Magick is all in your mind, but you have no idea how big your mind is. It includes everything around you.” Here, the person is not trying to explain their view of magick as clearly as possible. No, they’re playing word games, sounding like they’re saying one thing, then re-defining a word to say something completely different, so it sounds deep without really saying anything.

Even if you can’t say why, faux-wisdom doesn’t sound quite right. It makes science-minded people not take the speaker seriously. And established, widely-repeated faux-wisdom makes the whole community look bad.

Mostly, we encounter inaccurate but sincere beliefs, presented as well as the writer can manage. And so, our default response is respectful disagreement. Which is a good thing: We all benefit by having discussions rather than flame wars, and I’ve been glad for that tone in my comments.

But that doesn’t work for intentionally-confusing faux-wisdom. The meaning will shift throughout the discussion, and you just wind up talking in the same circles as the original speaker. Like arguing with a fool (“Never argue with a fool; onlookers may not be able to tell the difference.” -Mark Twain), listeners can’t tell who’s the charlatan and who’s the one trying to speak clearly. The person spouting the faux-wisdom gets to feel wise for having a “deep, thought-provoking discussion.” (You’ve heard that response, haven’t you?) Logically refuting faux-wisdom won’t get rid of it.

I think there’s a parallel with televised debates between biologists and creationists, where simply entering the debate was the wrong move, though I can’t quite pin down the analogy.

That’s why we need to simply call BS on fake wisdom, particularly when it comes from an established, respected source.

To quote myself from the comments: If it were a non-writer or a new blogger, I’d give him the benefit of the doubt. But when an established writer starts a popular meme by speaking in circles, I think we need to address what he said, not what he meant, and call BS. (He’s a professional writer, so we can assume he knows how to write clearly, and simply chose not to). The problem isn’t the idea itself, it’s the word-games and circular logic in the presentation.

Want more to read? Similar posts:

• Calling BS on Fake Wisdom
• 3 Ways the Information Model Goes Wrong, and Why it’s Still Important
• 8 New Ideas on Testing Magick

One last update: Ananael filled me in on some backstory of the quote. Apparently, it was intended to be satire. Looks like I’ve fallen into the trap of taking a satire seriously and railing against it. My bad. I’m leaving the posts up because (1) I believe in owning up to mistakes, not covering them up, and (2) these posts might be useful someday, when I have some legit word games to call BS on.

Note: Read this post first, it explains why calling BS matters.

I’d written this a few weeks ago, but never posted it. The experiments on quartz will resume tomorrow.

Sometimes, bullshit is a perfect example for showing how fake wisdom works, so you can recognize it quickly in the future. That’s what today’s post is about.

Frater SeA and Strategic Sorcery had a discussion about, “All that magick changes is you.” Someone else said it, they were discussing it.

If it meant, “Magick is just placebo and personal growth,” I’ll disagree, but I wouldn’t call BS. But the person who originally said it meant something like, “Magick only changes you, but we’re all one, and we’re all part of God, so really, you are everything around you.” Which is, like, totally deep, man.

Wait, no, sorry, not deep. The word I meant was bullshit.

Neither Frater SeA or Jason of Strategic Sorcery made the initial statement, and Jason discussed how it was a bad model, but they both treated it more seriously than it deserves. So, allow me to call BS, and show you why, so you can call BS on fake wisdom, too.

When you hear “Magick only changes you,” it sounds like the person is making a strong, concrete statement about the limitations of magick. No external changes.

Then you hear the re-definition: By ‘you’ they mean “Everything around you.” Now it sounds doubly-deep. Because you’re not just you, you’re, like, everything, man.

Specifically, it sounds deep because of the inconsistency between the standard definition of ‘you,’ and the re-definition of ‘you.’ Because humans don’t immediately replace words with definitions. No, when we hear the sentence, we react to the standard definitions of all the words, and only later does the logical mind kick in to do the translation.

Here’s a more obvious example, so you can see how replacing a definition works: Let’s say my friend, Bob, wants to give a futuristic-sounding talk, but he doesn’t really know anything. So he re-defines “car” to mean “Vehicle that transports people.” Then he talks about “water-faring cars” and “flying cars” and so on. It requires a conscious step to translate “flying car” into “airplane,” so you imagine a Jetsons car every time, even before you really process what he said. Translating into normal English takes effort, and dispelling that futuristic feeling takes effort, so most listeners don’t bother. And Bob gets to sound like he’s talking about a futuristic world, when he’s really just discussing 747s.

Try this: Replace the word with the definition. “Magick only changes your body plus everything around you.” Yeah, not so deeply-mystically-wise anymore, huh?

And that’s why it’s bullshit: It sounds deep and meaningful, but once you sort through the word games, it’s not really saying anything.

After writing this, but before I posted it, others weighed in too. Ananael does an excellent job of analyzing the “you are everything” model, though I think taking it seriously in the first place is a mistake. RO takes it seriously, disagrees with the idea, but doesn’t quite call BS. And Patrick Dunn makes a nice rimshot, which I think is roughly the right response.

Want more to read? Similar posts:

• Why Calling BS is Important
• Why Feynman Can’t Explain Magnets
• Understanding Energy Healing – Are You Making This Error?

In this series, I’m investigating how an orgone generator can produce magickal energy and charge a talisman. After some preliminary testing, I’m now focusing on the quartz at the center of the orgonite.

My first step, whenever I start exploring a new part of magick, is to simply connect and look around. This is tricky for me to explain, because we don’t have a mag-o-scope to display the magickal structures like x-rays display bones, so it’s not immediately clear what I mean by “look around.”

I’m normally skeptical when someone says they connected to X and saw Y. You should be too. Most mages mean that they absorbed a bit of X’s energy, relaxed their mind and let images enter their thoughts. And we all know how easily your expectations can influence the images that happen into your thoughts.

Sometimes, the images come from a source of psychic intuitions. Which means they’re symbolic, and a response to whatever question that ethereal software thinks was asked. So, not a firm basis for exploring how magick works, either.

To explore the inner-workings of magick, I had to develop a reliable way of seeing the moving parts. I call that technique “sensory connections.” Let’s review it before using it to explore the crystals.

If you just want the results, skip to “Exploring Quartz.”

Sensory Connections

I’ll start with a review of sensory connections, one of the core techniques of direct magick. It’s somewhat advanced, so don’t worry if you don’t follow every step, but here’s a quick summary of the technique:

1. Quiet your energy. Not so you don’t have energy, but so it’s steady. That way, changes in your own energy won’t distract you.
2. Make a connection without energy along it. This requires good control of mental muscles that handle connections.
3. For a good sensory connection, the structure that makes up the connection should also have a low amount of power.
4. Break that connection into many smaller ones, each covering one building block of the overall signature. The sum of those building blocks should add up to the overall signature. The smaller the scale of building blocks, the better.
5. Make many of these connections through the area you’re interested in, so you get a map, rather than a single point. The more points you touch, the better.
6. Align to signature of the area (which feels like getting the right focus for a microscope). Now you’re ready to look around. It’s more of feeling than seeing, even though I say “see” most of the time.

It’s… a bit complicated. Most direct magick is. To learn it, you’ll need to develop the mental muscles for each step, walk those muscles through the process, and practice each step it until it’s easy. Then practice the whole sequence together. I developed sensory connections over several years, but you could probably learn it in a few of months with focused practice. The full series on sensory connections is here, and I’ll be returning to it as I write my book.

Summary: I don’t have a mag-o-scope. Instead, I have a fancy technique that gives me a pretty good picture of magickal structures, along with some exercises for you to learn it. But ultimately, you’ll just have to trust me. Which hopefully you do, because distrust-fully reading a blog doesn’t sound like much fun.

Exploring Quartz

I connected to the quartz crystal, and spotted a large structure. Not energy at this point, because I’m not sending any energy into the crystal. (Remember, sensory connections don’t send energy.) But a large structure that could contain energy if you put some in.

That’s quite unusual. Normally, when I connect to something that’s alive, I see a lot of active structures, with their own energy. And when I connect to something that’s not alive — whether it’s dead wood or inorganic material — there’s hardly any structures there. It’s quite hard to spot anything, really. So a large, obvious, unpowered structure in nonliving matter? This is the first time I’ve seen that.

I also connected to an amethyst I had lying around. (I’d bought them around a decade ago, then gave them to Lisa because they were pretty.) Same deal: A large, obvious, unpowered structure. It had a different signature, but it’s essentially the same thing. So I’m guessing this is common to all quartzs, and possibly all crystals.

Lisa also had a necklace made of rose quartz, machined into half-inch beads. I could see a similar structure in each bead, but it was much smaller and less obvious. I think the machining damaged the magickal structure in some way.

And one last test: Do two pieces of quartz connect to the same magickal structure, or does each one have its own structure? If this is all based on some ethereal software for quartz, then all pieces of quartz would probably connect to the same structure, which would probably go to the ethereal software. Whereas, if the quartz itself creates a magickal structure, each piece would have its own.

I took two pieces of quartz, one in each hand, connected to them, and looked through those structures for my other connections. (This is a standard way that I test if two paths lead to the same structure. Spotting my own connection is fairly easy.) I could not spot my connection, which means each piece of quartz has its own magickal structure. Which suggests that the crystal generates the magickal structure, rather than receiving it from ethereal software.

This is the first time I’ve encountered a physical object generating a magickal anything, aside from living cells. I’m intrigued.

Tomorrow: How quartz interacts with magickal energy, and why people think quartz amplifies energy.

Want more to read? Similar posts:

• Energizing Quartz, Water and Ice
• Experiments with Orgone
• Exploring Magick’s Implementation